


Five Times Matt Stays Up Late (And One Time He Gets His Ass to Bed)

by Severina



Category: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Genre: Community: smallfandomfest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-23
Updated: 2012-11-23
Packaged: 2017-11-19 08:08:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/571065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severina/pseuds/Severina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What it says on the tin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Matt Stays Up Late (And One Time He Gets His Ass to Bed)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LJ's smallfandomfest, for the prompt "it's after midnight..."
> 
> * * *

I

“You know what time it is?”

Matt jerks, his eyes flicking from the computer screen to John standing in the office doorway. Wearing only his pajama pants. And a scowl. 

He tries a smile. “That late?”

“It’s after midnight,” John says shortly.

Matt blinks. “Wow. Already? You should have come in and—“

“I said hello to you when I got home,” John interrupts. “And again at dinner. Or maybe you think the congealed spaghetti teleported to your room?”

Matt looks guiltily at the plate propped unsteadily on the pile of papers at the edge of his desk. He does have a vague, half-formed memory of its arrival – something about carbs and passing out – but other than that he’s been so immersed in his coding that most everything beyond the letters and numbers scrolling on his screen is a blur.

“Dude,” he starts.

“Come to bed.”

“It’s just—“

“Come to _bed_ , Matthew.”

Matt holds up a hand. “I could do that. I could totally go to bed. But the problem, John? Is that I won’t sleep. I’ll just end up lying there trying to work the code in my head, because I’m telling you, that stuff does not let up, it’s crazy busy up here, it’s nuts. And then I’ll toss and turn and then you’ll growl at me, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, John, but you actually literally growl—“

John pushes away from the door. “Just break the damn code.”

“Actually, I’m not trying to break it, I’m trying to construct an algorhythmic interface that will be impervious to…” Matt pauses, finally taking in the look on John’s face. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll break the damn code.”

 

II

“No,” John says. “No way.”

Matt flops down on the end of the sofa, raises a bushy eyebrow his way. “What?”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Well,” Matt says, “if I go by the time on your VCR, it’s always twelve o’clock.”

Kid’s always gotta be a damn smartass. 

“It’s after midnight,” John points out.

“It is,” Matt agrees, gesturing with his spoon. “Also, I have no idea what we’re talking about.”

“It’s after midnight,” John repeats patiently. “You don’t eat ice cream after midnight.”

Matt snorts out a laugh. “What? Is that some kind of McClane household rule?” He swirls the spoon into his bowl, emerges with a blob of vanilla dripping with chocolate syrup. “’Cause I gotta tell ya, that’s a really dumb rule. Possibly the dumbest of all the McClane rules. And I say this having already borne witness to the Barbeque Sauce Must Always Be Stored Upside Down rule and the No Drinking Straight From the Orange Juice Container rule.”

“It’s unhygienic!” John says testily.

“You’ll stick your tongue down my throat but you won’t drink from a container that I’ve… no, never mind, not going there again,” Matt says. He dips the spoon into his mouth, continues with his mouth full. “So why is this a rule?”

John hesitates. He knows this. Something about the metabolism? Weight gain? Or maybe it was just because ice cream made the kids hyper and he and Holly’d have to spend two hours trying to get them settled into bed. 

“It’s bad for you,” he settles on. 

“It’s bad for me at one in the afternoon, too. Try again, detective.”

John huffs out a breath, pulls up from the sofa with a grunt. “I’m going to bed.”

“Hah! There is no reason!”

“Smartass,” John mutters. He smoothes a hand through Matt’s hair as he passes his end of the sofa, and when Matt reaches up a hand to fist in his T-shirt he lets Matt tug him down into a kiss. When he finally straightens, he licks his lips. 

Maybe a little bit of ice cream before bed isn’t so bad.

 

III

“Okay,” Matt says to the empty room, “John was right. This might have been a bad idea.”

On the paused big-screen, the little dead girl is frozen in the act of crawling through the television screen, dripping with well water, her matted dark hair obscuring her face. 

The cheese popcorn that he’d eagerly eaten earlier in the evening sits like a lead weight in his stomach.

Matt glances from the screen to the closed door of the bedroom. Now that the sound is off, he can hear John snoring. He never thought that chainsaw-roar would sound so damn comforting.

He gets up, takes a couple of halting steps toward the bedroom. He could just go in, strip off his clothes, spoon up behind John. Close his eyes and go to sleep and pretend he never saw this stupid movie. 

He should have listened to John. He never should have started this thing after midnight.

He hesitates, glances again at the screen. 

If he doesn’t watch the whole damn thing, he’ll never hear the end of it.

Matt gulps, sits back down, and flicks the movie back on.

 

IV

John moves quietly into the room and stands behind Matt’s chair, watching.

Matt’s eyes are intent on the monitor, his headset firmly on his head. On the screen, a miniature version of Matt – right down to the flyaway hair, the multiple layers of long- and short-sleeved shirts, and the big brown eyes – crouches behind an overturned semi-truck. Not quite a cartoon and not quite a CGI construct, this mini-Matt is something he’s never seen before but still looks eerily familiar. He finds himself wondering if mini-Matt also has the scar on his knee… or the tiny tattoo etched on his hip.

Mini-Matt leans around the truck, fires off a round into the near distance. So there’s one difference -- he’s certain that _his_ Matt has never hauled around some weird AK-47 hybrid that spouts purple laser fire.

He crosses his arms, lets his gaze drift around Matt’s office. There’s a new action figure taking up residence on the shelf, some comic book featuring lunging black and white zombies half-open on the old lazyboy in the corner. Posters on the wall of greasy looking rock stars he’s never heard of and disheveled women in too much black eye makeup. Throw in the red bull at Matt’s elbow and the very computer game he’s playing, and--

“You really are a walking cliché, geekboy,” he says.

Matt jumps, and John grins as mini-Matt gives his own aborted leap on the screen. 

“Hey,” Matt says over his shoulder.

John snorts. “Hey. You coming to bed? It’s after midnight.”

“Shit, already?” Matt swivels in the chair, looks up at him through his bangs in that way that makes John’s fingers twitch to smooth them out of his eyes. “We started playing at seven!”

“I know,” John says drily.

Matt bites his lip guiltily, no doubt remembering the flip “I’ll be a couple of hours, tops” he’d flung over his shoulder when he headed to his office. 

“We just got really into it,” he says by way of explanation. “We never figured we’d get this far, but between Tava and I we were able to crack the equation leading to the seventh tomb – which believe me, John, if you knew anything about this game you would understand the monumental accomplishment right there – and then there ended up being a hidden tunnel to Acropolis in the armory, and—“

_“Red One, watch your twenty!”_

Matt whirls back to the screen, fingers already flying on the keys. On the computer monitor, John watches as a multi-tentacled creature advancing on mini-Matt explodes into a burst of red-tinged slime.

“Got it,” Matt says into the headset.

_“You got lucky,”_ the tinny voice replies from the speakers. _“Keep your eyes open, Red One!”_

“Sounds like my goddamn captain,” John says.

Matt smiles weakly. “Travis takes the game a little seriously.”

_He’s not the only one_ , John thinks when Matt turns his full attention back to the monitor, his nimble fingers moving mini-Matt away from the tentacle-fireball. He shakes his head, claps a hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Don’t stay up too late, kid.”

“Yeah, okay,” Matt says distractedly.

“And hey,” he calls back from the doorway, “maybe later you can play with your dolls.”

He’s almost made it to their room when he hears Matt yell back, “They’re collectibles, McClane!”

 

V

Matt knows he’s got an obsessive personality. It’s part of the reason he’s so good at the job he does. Not only does he have a flair for mathematics, but once he’s started on a piece of coding, he won’t stop – can’t stop – until he’s solved it. Worked out all the bugs, made sure every line does exactly what it should.

But knowing that particular personality trait, he really should never have opened the puzzle box.

He’s pretty sure this was supposed to be his ‘joke’ Christmas present from Lucy. A jigsaw of a mostly black star field, with no edge pieces? Basically enough to drive a normal person insane.

Matt, however, is not normal.

His back hurts from hunching over the dining room table and his eyes are burning. But he’s so damn close.

“Jeeeeeeezus, kid, it’s after midnight,” John says when he wanders into the room. “Give it a rest.”

Matt straightens, runs a hand through his hair. “I’ve almost got it,” he says.

“It ain’t a race,” John says. 

Matt mumbles something that he hopes John will take as agreement, and decides not to mention that the Warlock went out and bought the exact same puzzle so it kind of IS. But he murmurs his appreciation when John steps up behind him and lays those big hands on his shoulders, rubs and kneads with a precision that would make a professional masseur jealous.

“Mmm. That feels good,” Matt says.

He shivers when John’s lips graze his ear. “Come to bed, and it’ll get better.”

He’s tempted. He really is. But—

“Five more minutes,” he promises.

“Uh huh,” John says skeptically. 

Matt smiles when John presses a kiss to the shell of his ear and leaves him to it. He stretches before leaning back over the table. He really is so damn close.

 

VI

Before he met Matthew Farrell, John had never known anyone to make so much goddamn noise in bed.

When things are just heating up, the kid feels the need to fill the silence with a running commentary complete with snarky one-liners. And once things get really moving, he starts with the instructions. Like John doesn’t know what he’s doing, like he hasn’t been through this a time or three, the first time being before the kid was fucking born – though John shutters that thought as quickly as it flits across his mind. He’s already worked out all his issues on that subject, thank you very much.

John now makes it his nightly goal to shut the kid up. To get him to that place where all he can do is gasp and moan and mutter the odd strangled word. Where his eyes are scrunched tight and his hands are either twisting in the sheets or flailing in the air. 

Like now.

John snaps his hips, knows he’s hit the perfect spot when Matt’s eyes fly open, when his perfect mouth parts. John thrusts again, surges forward and bends the kid practically in two so he can capture that mouth, plunge his tongue inside in perfect time with his hips. When he pulls away Matt’s eyes are unfocused, his lips bruised and swollen.

“Breathe, Matty,” he murmurs.

Matt takes in a ragged breath, bites his lip when John’s hand snakes between them. He releases his white-knuckled grip on the sheets long enough to clamp a hand at the nape of John’s neck, tugs firmly. John considers making him work for it, but he loves to watch Matt fall apart too damn much, so he lets Matt draw him down, nips and sucks at his collarbone the way he knows Matt likes it, works him with his hand until Matt shakes and quivers, arches his back and comes in a warm surge over his knuckles. He’s still quaking from the aftershocks when John follows, biting at Matt’s shoulder to muffle his own moans.

“Okay, that was…” Matt starts a few minutes later, when they are lying side by side, heart rates back to normal.

“Yeah,” John says smugly. “It was.”

Matt flips over onto his side, entirely too energetic after just having gone through such a soul-shaking orgasm. John would be jealous of his youth if he wasn’t so damn tired. He sees the kid’s eyes flick to the old wind-up alarm on the bedside table before he shakes his sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes and runs a hand over John’s chest. “Round two?”

John groans. “I gotta be up for work in—“

“It’s barely after midnight,” Matt interrupts.

“I’m an old man, Matthew,” John protests, but when Matt’s nimble fingers head south, his dick gives a twitch that most definitely indicates interest. And when Matt follows the trail of his fingers with his lips, John gasps and tangles his own fingers in the kid’s hair. “You’re gonna be the death of me, kid,” he manages to get out.

Matt looks up from his ministrations with a grin, and licks his lips. “But what a way to go, John,” he says. “What a way to go.”


End file.
